Abstract

With subrecoil-laser-cooled atoms, one may reach nanokelvin temperatures while the ergodic properties of these systems do not follow usual statistical laws. Instead, due to an ingenious trapping mechanism in momentum space, power-law-distributed sojourn times are found for the cooled particles. Here, we show how this gives rise to a statistical-mechanical framework based on infinite ergodic theory, which replaces ordinary ergodic statistical physics of a thermal gas of atoms. In particular, the energy of the system exhibits a sharp discontinuous transition in its ergodic properties. Physically, this is controlled by the fluorescence rate, but, more profoundly, it is a manifestation of a transition for any observable, from being an integrable to becoming a nonintegrable observable, with respect to the infinite (non-normalized) invariant density.

Highlights

  • With subrecoil-laser-cooled atoms, one may reach nanokelvin temperatures while the ergodic properties of these systems do not follow usual statistical laws

  • We show how this gives rise to a statistical-mechanical framework based on infinite ergodic theory, which replaces ordinary ergodic statistical physics of a thermal gas of atoms

  • The energy of the system exhibits a sharp discontinuous transition in its ergodic properties. This is controlled by the fluorescence rate, but, more profoundly, it is a manifestation of a transition for any observable, from being an integrable to becoming a nonintegrable observable, with respect to the infinite invariant density

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Summary

Introduction

With subrecoil-laser-cooled atoms, one may reach nanokelvin temperatures while the ergodic properties of these systems do not follow usual statistical laws. In the context of subrecoil-laser cooling, this time diverges, and, no matter how long one measures, deviations from standard ergodic theory are prominent. Our goal is to show how tools of infinite ergodic theory describe the statistical properties of the ensemble and corresponding time averages of the subrecoil-laser-cooled atoms.

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